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A visitor’s wants and behaviors change almost as much as a 17-year-old prom queen’s hopeful shopping for the perfect gown. If you were to tell that same 17-year-old, “It looks great” every time she asked you, “What do you think?” she’d eventually resent your opinion and not value it at all. But if you gave her a new answer based on the cut of the dress, she’s going to keep coming back with questions. That’s what you want your visitors to feel regarding your site’s content. It has the right answers at the right time, and they can feel safe coming back with new questions.

What’s great about a website is that it’s a digital property and it can morph based on your audience’s needs and wants. Seeking feedback from your visitors is the beginning of Lean UX, the practice of creating the minimum viable product for your visitors. All you’re focused on when you’re in this phase are the bare essentials your visitors are requesting. This thinking becomes a little difficult for some to grasp, because, after all, your website is your online soapbox to shout out to your audience all the great things that make your business unique and better than the competition. Unfortunately for you, people don’t typically enjoy it when someone stands on a soapbox and spits out sentence fragments at them that don’t have context to their situation.

You might ask: “But what if the feedback I’m getting is something that doesn’t pertain to my business goals?” That’s a good question. The best-case scenario is that it’s a simple messaging problem and you’re not being clear of your services. At which point, it may be easy to change your messaging strategy to more clearly define your offerings. The worst-case scenario is that you need to create the information or services that your visitors are requesting. Maybe this is as simple as doing an in-depth blog post, but it may mean that you need to create an entire section for your site with videos to help visitors find the answer they’re looking for. This approach may seem like a timely and expensive investment, but you can at least rest assured you have an audience chomping at the bit for this type of content.

There are many ways to get your users to give you feedback. The easiest is to just ask. You’d be surprised how many visitors want to help you out if they’re avid customers. You can reach out over the phone or email and ask basic questions, like “What are you looking for when you come to our site?” or “What do you wish our site had that it doesn’t already?” The answers to this type of feedback can give you a wealth of content ideas for your site. It doesn’t mean you have to publish it ASAP. You can assess the plausibility of quickly posting this content to answer your visitors’ needs while putting some feedback on the back burner that are part of a bigger picture.